POEM: MEANING OF ONE TAWNY STRANGER

To those wondering why I call myself this,

Know that I am

ONE

Of thousands,

Millions,

Billions

Whose existence reminds the world ‘white’ web

There’s no safety in numbers

When countless ones of me are deleted from the hardware of history.

You receive a cheque for

One thousand,

One million,

One billion pounds

Then the one is scratched out,

What are you left with?

Will you raise a fuss

The same fuss you make over a stolen pound coin,

Or push it to the back of your grey matter

Where zero = nothing

And nothing = doesn’t matter

So you don’t really mind?

I’m not Wesley Snipes or Terrance Howard

Damn right.

 

True.

So I can’t afford to not mind. I’m

TAWNY.

My hue lies midway in the spectrum of this

Scientifically inaccurate, politically correct,

Ancestry-whitewashing Eurocentric concept called ‘Blackness’

And I’m not painting myself in it. Why?

They tar their eyeballs colour-blind

Yet on the collective subconscious canvas the tale they paint is the same,

That everyone in the past who just happened to look like me

Contributed never created history –

Forget that we existed for 200,000 years plus

While they existed for 12,000 years minus.

They paint our story began in slavery –

Ignore that they were international slaves

Before they gained global superpower status,

They paint I’m an ethnic minority –

Never mind that they have never totalled more than a third of our species.

Real problem is I’m an ethnic majority,

But when I paint that out the world tars me a

STRANGER

As does my Muslim upbringing.

Like a hyena hungry for echoes of expired lives

I scavenged for the meat of wise words well past their wisdom date,

Accidentally wolfed down a Muhammadan statement that my system still regurgitates:

Badaä (a)l-islāmu gariybā

Wa saya^üwdu kamā badaä gariybā,

Fa-ṭuwbā lil-gurabā.

“Islam began as something strange

And it will return to how it began – strange,

So blessings to the strangers.”

All my life I’ve been estranged,

An immigrant seeking asylum in his own country. I’ve not found it.

I’ve never fit in.

Can’t sing and dance, shuck and jive or rap,

No swagger, no gold shackles on my neck, don’t live in a council flat.

Wear pants on my waist not half off my ass,

Never made trouble at school – never once bunked class.

Never owned a gun or done time, I don’t speak slang,

I believe women are people not “tings” to bang,

Manhood’s about what you do with it not if it’s bigger,

Born in UK but I don’t say “blud”, “fam”, “my yout” or “my …”

That’s that shit I don’t like

Dunno the difference between marijuana, weed, ganja, cannabis…

What, they’re the same thing?

That’s this poem gone up in smoke.

Bye.

Joking!

I’m Jamaican but you won’t hear me boast

“Oh, I got Indian in me” and “oh, I got Chinese in me” –

Which I do by the way;

Instead I big up my possibly Ghanaian

But definitely mostly African roots Whatever they are

Because they are to me what I am to this world:

One Tawny Stranger.